Stressed? Cuddle up to a giraffe
It’s a Wednesday morning in late March, and a little more than 170,000 people online are staring at a pregnant giraffe as she stands in her enclosure.
This is April. She is pregnant. And the Internet is in love.
April is far from the first animal to find viral video fame simply by being alive. But the saga of her pregnancy has become the perfect refuge from the political warring of 2017.
In a social climate where everything is fuel for the proverbial dumpster fire that is political discourse, April and animal livestreams like hers give us something that’s increasingly harder to come by: an apolitical entertainment experience.
Give or take a conversation about animal activism or climate change, nature livestreams are serving up content that is nearly impossible to weaponize. They’re a bright ray of sunshine in the doom and gloom that is a Facebook feed full of fake news, fake fake news and photos of other people’s children.
The story of April is simple. She’s a giraffe. She got pregnant. She’s due to have a baby at any moment and has been for two months.
Her livestream began in late February, when Animal Adventure Park, her home in Harpursville, N.Y., originally expected her to give birth. One mating miscalculation and a 15-month gestation period mean that it’s now April, and April, at press time, is still expecting.
Jordan Patch, owner of Animal Adventure Park, attributes April’s popularity to a sense of wonder we feel when we get a glimpse at a world we’d otherwise never see.
“A tip of the hat to P.T. Barnum in providing the public with what they do not normally get to experience, though perhaps it has been there all along,” Patch told The Times.
We love watching April bump heads with the father of her calf, like we loved watching young National Zoo panda Bei Bei snooze on top of her mom, like we love watching bears catching salmon in an Alaska national park. The appeal of watching these animals isn’t necessarily the lure of the exotic but the calm of the familiar.
So if the world has got you down and you can’t bear another moment obsessing about Russian scandals and executive orders, relief is just a livestream away. And will almost certainly feature a baby giraffe. Any day now.